Yet another Fermi paradox paper, but interesting

Well done Arenamontanus! (Arenamontanus on these forums makes no mystery of actually being Anders Sandberg, and he's one of the authors)

Using a log-uniform distribution fitted to a collection of point-estimate values with different orders of magnitude is still making an assumption (i.e. why log-uniform?) but it's certainly better that using point-estimates.

I also like how neutral the paper is - it's not trying to push either thesis (there is or isn't life out there), it's just about the maths.

Using a log-uniform distribution fitted to a collection of point-estimate values with different orders of magnitude is still making an assumption (i.e. why log-uniform?) but it's certainly better that using point-estimates.

But as we are lacking observations, we need to make assumptions.
If we had detections of life on other planets in our solar system, that would greatly influence the very uncertain assumption on the emergence of life in the paper.
As to why log-uniform, what else would you use? Log-normal or just equal spacing. As far as I understand it, both would move the whole probability more towards the Fermi-Paradox again, i. e. a high estimated occurence of ETI, where we observe none.
Good questione about thelog-uniform. I have to think some more about that.